We start with the story of the rogue trader at UBS who lost £1.4bn.
Kweku Adoboli has been jailed for seven years in an emblematic case which exposes a culture that prevailed both before and after the financial meltdown.
Business Correspondent Siobhan Kennedy has been in court through most of the trial, her report at 7.

A stunning development from the computer giant Hewlett Packard which has just announced that a British company it bought for almost $10bn could be worth less than a seventh of that sum.
Dr Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, the company it acquired, is reported to have made some $500m from the sale.
H-P claims accounting irregularities and a failure to disclose, allegations denied by Mr Lynch who was praised in speeches by David Cameron as an example to us all before today’s claims were made.
Economics Editor Faisal Islam has been watching these extraordinary developments unfold.

Israel and Hamas ceasefire nears

As we go to air at 7, all being well, Israel and Hamas will announce a ceasefire which will come into force at 10pm our time tonight but at the same time the civilian population in great swathes of the Gaza Strip have been warned to stay away from the homes and move further inland, suggesting there may be a final Israeli assault of some scale. Chief Correspondent Alex Thomson reports.

You will almost certainly have lost track of how many charges Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson now face.
Today a new slew of charges have been brought against them, this time concerning allegations of payments to public officials.
One woman at the MoD is alleged to have received £100,000 over ten years. Home Affairs Correspondent Andy Davies is on the case.

The government has announced the simplification of the energy sector and the tariffs that can now be offered to consumers.
It’s claiming that the electricity and gas companies will be forced to offer the lowest tariffs, but when I interviewed the Secretary of State for Energy, Ed Davey, he was unable to tell me the numbers his department most surely know of who will benefit. Mr Davey claims the average consumer will be better off. Political Correspondent Michael Crick is lighting the fires

Outbreaks of rain across southern and eastern parts of the UK, turning heavy and persistent in places. Scattered showers and strong winds across northwest Scotland and Northern Ireland. Becoming mainly dry across many northern areas and the far south west.

Tomorrow’s weather

Scattered showers in parts of the northwest, as well as rain in the south and east, will gradually clear. Largely dry and bright by the afternoon.

Related posts:

There is 1 comment on this post

Mudplugger
21-Nov-12at

On the Kweku Adoboli story, can someone explain why, when an employee of any other company disregards management instructions causeing his company to lose money, although making no personal gain, he would be subject to an internal disciplinary process, the maximum sanction of which would be dismissal from his job.

Yet, when an employee of a financial institution commits exactly the same operational ‘offence’, he is promptly dragged into the criminal courts, convicted of ‘fraud’ (despite making no fraudulent gain) and sentenced to many years in jail.

What’s so different about the banking industry which gives it the right to use the criminal courts as their own ‘employee behaviour tribunals’ ?
Or is that a naive question from someone who believes we should all be equal before the law ?

I’m not defending Adoboli’s trading incompetence, or his creative attempts to cover his position, but all he did was to do his job badly, and that’s not a criminal offence in my view.